{"id":2408,"date":"2018-11-25T22:17:38","date_gmt":"2018-11-25T22:17:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/?p=2408"},"modified":"2018-11-25T22:46:31","modified_gmt":"2018-11-25T22:46:31","slug":"whats-next","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/2018\/11\/whats-next\/","title":{"rendered":"What&#8217;s next?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"giphy-embed\" src=\"https:\/\/giphy.com\/embed\/MSYI0G3QS3UU8\" width=\"480\" height=\"360\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m turning 38 and as of 13 contractual days ago, I have a job at Bulb as Head of Labs (new products, new parternships). <a href=\"https:\/\/bulb.co.uk\/\">Bulb is an affordable and green energy company<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>So I&#8217;m back working in Shoreditch in a <a href=\"https:\/\/secondhome.io\/\">co-working space<\/a> set up by David Cameron&#8217;s former digital advisor that looks like something out of The Shining. I&#8217;m running a team in a business of 300 employees.<\/p>\n<p>Some of this feels new (where did all these young people come from?), some of this is not (Bagels on Brick Lane). It&#8217;s definitely strange though.<\/p>\n<p>Why did I take a job you ask?<\/p>\n<p>Well. It turns out that pioneering in the internet of things space isn&#8217;t really what pays the bills anymore. Writing a book doesn&#8217;t pay them at all and without sales reports, I&#8217;ll only know once a year (if a check comes through the door) how successful that has been. And then there&#8217;s Brexit. Many of my friends in #iot consultancies and startups have reported a rather quiet year. Does it feel like the financial crisis did? I don&#8217;t know as I had started Tinker in 2007 when I moved to London, aged 26. Since then I&#8217;ve managed to do quite a few things:<\/p>\n<p>&#8211; sold the first Arduinos in the UK<br \/>\n&#8211; hired the best in the country to help me run Arduino, product, innovation workshops<br \/>\n&#8211; worked with a variety of companies from adland, traditional press to R&amp;D departments<br \/>\n&#8211; ran an <a href=\"http:\/\/designswarm.com\/homesense\/\">open source project on the smart home<\/a> which is in the permanent collection of the MoMA<br \/>\n&#8211; made a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.moma.org\/interactives\/exhibitions\/2011\/talktome\/objects\/145464\/\">smart\/dumb button<\/a> for russell which is also in the permanent collection of the MoMa<br \/>\n&#8211; commercialised a 2G version of the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.goodnightlamp.com\">Good Night Lamp <\/a>which is in\u00a0the <a href=\"https:\/\/designmuseum.org\/exhibitions\/designer-maker-user\">permanent collection of the London Design Museum <\/a>and has\u00a0been exhibited in the Science Gallery in Dublin, the Steven Lawrence Gallery and is currently in the<a href=\"https:\/\/www.scienceandmediamuseum.org.uk\/whats-on\/never-alone\"> National Science and Media Museum<\/a> in Bradford as part of an exhibition on the home and security<br \/>\n&#8211; run the first <a href=\"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/2013\/12\/what-i-learnt-from-running-an-internet-of-things-pop-up-shop\/\">#iot pop-up shop from my office<\/a><br \/>\n&#8211; curated <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thegoodhome.org\">2 years of projects<\/a> and events around the smart home across Europe<br \/>\n&#8211; wrote <a href=\"http:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/book\">a book about smart homes<\/a> which was published in September by Apress<br \/>\n&#8211; I&#8217;ve been running the <a href=\"http:\/\/iot.london\">London internet of things<\/a> meetup for almost 8 years.<br \/>\n&#8211; I&#8217;ve given talks about innovation, the internet of things around the world (apart from Africa and South America).<br \/>\n&#8211; I&#8217;ve offered multi-day training both digitally and in person around the internet of things.<br \/>\n&#8211; I&#8217;ve been a visiting lecturer in the most prestigious schools across Europe.<br \/>\n&#8211; I&#8217;ve mentored professionals in search of a career change towards #iot.<br \/>\n&#8211; I&#8217;ve given feedback to PhD students around the world<br \/>\n&#8211; I&#8217;ve mentored and made connections for startups<br \/>\n&#8211; I&#8217;ve worked as an independent consultant for companies in the energy, smart agricultural, FMCG , industrial sectors and more<br \/>\n&#8211; I produced the first 2 UK editions of the Mozilla Festival<br \/>\n&#8211; I&#8217;ve worked with engineers, developers, designers, product managers, marketers and more.<br \/>\n&#8211; Two years ago I took 75 flights that year. This year it&#8217;s 45.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s fair to say I rushed through much of the last 10 years life. As an immigrant keen to &#8216;make my mark&#8217; I suppose it was inevitable. But as I started to relax into my official new home (and status as a British citizen) I started to look at things a little differently. I don&#8217;t consider I&#8217;ve been smart for most of my career but I do know I was first to reach a lot of invisible lines in the sand. And for the first time perhaps I&#8217;m content in the knowledge that it doesn&#8217;t matter if nobody knows nor if I slow down a bit.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m also willing to learn from working *inside* an organisation and Hayden Wood, the CEO of Bulb, is kind enough to give me that platform. Whether he realises it or not, I&#8217;m doing exactly the same thing as I usually do, working with people I like, hiring people I respect, working with organisations and figuring out what the best outcome will be. I&#8217;m also surrounded by friends who work in different bits of the business and that&#8217;s fun. It&#8217;s a scale-up and I&#8217;ve never worked in a business at that stage. It reminds me of Inception, the metaphysical furniture and building moving around me. But that&#8217;s also the kind of environment I thrive in.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m not full time yet as I still have a couple of clients still ticking over, a book to promote and the redesign of the Good Night Lamp for CAT-M networks, but that&#8217;s not a lot for me. Slowing down is relative.<\/p>\n<p>If you&#8217;re doing some exciting things with green technologies, hit me up at alexds at bulb dot co dot uk .<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m turning 38 and as of 13 contractual days ago, I have a job at Bulb as Head of Labs (new products, new parternships). Bulb is an affordable and green energy company. So I&#8217;m back working in Shoreditch in a co-working space set up by David Cameron&#8217;s former digital advisor that looks like something out&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/2018\/11\/whats-next\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">What&#8217;s next?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[108],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2408","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p41XhY-CQ","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2408","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2408"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2408\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2410,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2408\/revisions\/2410"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}